3

Bismarck: The ‘Mad Junker’

On 6 July 1806 Karl Wilhelm Ferdinand von Bismarck (1771–1845) married Wilhelmine Louise Mencken (1789–1839) in the Royal Palace and Garrison Church in Potsdam.¹ Ferdinand von Bismarck, the youngest of four brothers, was ‘the least educated of them and richly indolent’.² ‘Uncle Ferdinand’ had an amiable and unpretentious character. He was a kindly, decent, mildly eccentric, country squire, rather like Squire Allworthy in Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones. His son described life with his father in a letter to his sister in December of 1844, and noted how his father liked to organize elaborate hunting excursions in deepest winter in minus 8 degrees Celsius temperature when nothing stirs and when nobody shoots a thing. His father had four thermometers and a barometer, which he would look at one after another, several times each day, tapping each to make sure they were working. Otto von Bismarck urged his sister to write about the small things of life which give their father real pleasure:

whom you visit, what you have eaten, what the horses are doing, how the servants behave, whether the doors squeak and if the windows let in draughts, in short, real things, facta.³

His niece Hedwig von Bismarck remembered ‘Uncle Ferdinand’ fondly: ‘he always had a friendly word for us or a cheerful joke especially when Otto and I rode on his knees … and he was often teased when reminded of the entry he wrote in a guest book of a hotel under the heading character: ‘beastly’. On hearing of the death of a distant relative through whom he gained the inheritance of the Pomeranian estates of Kniephof, Jarz, and Külz he remarked cheerfully, ‘a cold uncle served in estate sauce is a very acceptable dish.’⁴ Fielding’s squires, on the other hand, never controlled serf labour but Ferdinand von Bismarck did. On 15 March 1803 he issued a manorial order addressed ‘to my subjects’:

I will here once again make known that in future I will hold all strictly accountable to the end that those who do not do their duty or deserve punishment may not excuse themselves by saying they did not know …⁵

Like many Junkers he treated his estate as a little kingdom. He exercised a range of feudal powers and had a court on the estate in which he acted as judge and jury. As late as 1837 more than three million Prussian subjects lived under manorial courts of the kind that Ferdinand von Bismarck convened, 13.8 per cent of the total population of the Kingdom.⁶ He appointed pastors and schoolmasters on ‘his lands’ and expected nobody, not state officials nor neighbours, to intervene. Ferdinand von Bismarck and the gentry of Brandenburg constituted what Monica Wienfort describes as the ‘stronghold of conservative, feudal politics’.⁷ In the years of Bismarck’s childhood, the feudal rights of the landlords eroded irregularly but markedly. Many of the gentry defended such rights in the hope that the state would compensate them for their surrender, especially the right to convene manorial courts.

Otto von Bismarck had a difficult relationship with his father. All parents embarrass children but Ferdinand’s ineffectual, kindly incompetence did more than embarrass his brilliant son. In February of 1847, a month after his engagement to Johanna von Puttkamer, he wrote her a revealing letter about his parents:

I really loved my father. When not with him I felt remorse concerning my conduct toward him and made resolutions that I was unable to keep for the most part. How often did I repay his truly boundless, unselfish, good-natured tenderness for me with coldness and bad grace? Even more frequently I made a pretence of loving him, not wanting to violate my own code of propriety, when inwardly I felt hard and unloving because of his apparent weakness. I was not in a position to pass judgement on those weaknesses, which annoyed me only when coupled with gaucherie. And yet I cannot deny that I really loved him in my heart. I wanted to show you how much it oppresses me when I think about it.⁸

In the same letter, he describes his mother:

My mother was a beautiful woman, who loved external elegance, who possessed a bright, lively intelligence, but little of what the Berliner calls Gemüth [untranslatable but ‘warm heart’ might do.—JS]. She wished that I should learn much and become much, and it often appeared to me that she was hard and cold. As a small child I hated her; later I successfully deceived her with falsehoods. One only learns the value of the mother for the child when it is too late, when she is dead. The most modest maternal love, even when mixed with much selfishness, is still enormous compared with the love of the child.⁹

Wilhelmine Mencken, Bismarck’s mother, came from a very different world from that of the eccentric rural squire, Ferdinand von Bismarck. Born in Berlin in 1789 her family had great prospects. Wilhelmine’s father, Royal Cabinet Councilor Anastasius Ludwig Mencken (1752–1801), was the son of a cultivated professorial family in Helmstedt in the Duchy of Brunswick. Young Anastasius Ludwig ran away from home to Berlin to escape the family pressure to become a lawyer or professor in the tiny state of his birth. Mencken was so literate, charming, and quick that, though he was without family connections at court or money, he became a diplomat and rose by sheer ability to the rank of cabinet secretary in 1782 under Frederick the Great at the age of 30. He married a wealthy widow, wrote essays, and corresponded with leading figures of the Berlin enlightenment.¹⁰ Under Frederick William II he continued his diplomatic career, and gained a reputation as ‘intellectually the most important’ of the Cabinet Councillors.¹¹ An unfortunate publication in 1792 suggested to his enemies that he was a ‘Jacobin’, that is, a supporter of the French Revolution. The King dismissed him. Since he had his wife’s comfortable fortune, he devoted himself to philosophy and political theory as a leading member of a Berlin circle of reform-minded bureaucrats and writers, who hoped for better things under the Crown Prince.

Friedrich Gentz (1764–1832) who later served as Metternich’s closest adviser, now turned his ambitious eyes on Mencken. Klaus Epstein describes young Gentz:

He was determined to ‘crash’ the narrow circle of the aristocracy by the force of his brilliance and personal charm, and he was unburdened by middle-class scruples in such matters as money or sex. His ability made him the greatest German political pamphleteer of his age; his connections allowed him to become ‘the secretary of Europe’ at the time of the Congress of Vienna.¹²

Gentz wrote extravagant love letters which are full of tears and imitations of Goethe’s young Werther but without the slightest intention to commit suicide. He frequented the salons of Berlin and practised what Sweet calls his ‘Parlour Technique’. In 1788 he met the brilliant young philosopher Wilhelm von Humboldt, who said in 1788, ‘Gentz is a windbag who pays court to every woman.’¹³ Gentz had by now become what Sweet describes as ‘an erratic brilliant egoist with a greater capacity for loyalty to ideas than to people’.¹⁴ His judgement on how to climb the greasy pole we can trust and he saw in 1795 that Anastasius Ludwig Mencken had a bright future. Mencken represented the rule of the enlightened bureaucracy, which came to be known as the ‘cabinet party’. So Gentz in his ruthless way cultivated Anastasius Ludwig Mencken, the most important figure in the ‘cabinet party’. Gentz hoped that Mencken would reward him when the old King died.¹⁵ The calculation came off in 1797. The new King Frederick William III named Mencken on the third day of his reign to the top civil administrative post, which involved, according to Gentz, ‘direction of all civil affairs only on terms which reflect everlasting honor upon him and on the King’.¹⁶ In November 1797 Gentz wrote an open letter to the new King on the programme of reform. The King read it out to the court. As Gentz wrote to his friend Böttiger: ‘This small and unworthy production has made a sensation among all classes and has brought me actually one of the pleasantest experiences of my life.’¹⁷

When in 1797 Frederick William III made Mencken his Cabinet Chief, he became responsible for all petitions to the King. Like the White House chief of staff, Mencken filtered requests and his daily notebook listed them, as ‘refused’ or ‘rejected’. As Engelberg writes:

On the treadmill of bureaucratic work as a royal servant and cabinet chief, a discrepancy opened between the thinker occupied with humanity, enlightenment declarations made in his free hours and the official rigours of daily work with its decisions. A civil service mentality developed very early.¹⁸

At some point in these years Anastasius Ludwig Mencken wrote out his personal credo as a civil servant, which shows us what a remarkable figure he was:

I have never crawled, nor thrown myself away. In consideration of my political position I have only seen myself as a passenger on a long sea journey. He will take care to avoid swearing with the sailors, or drinking with the passengers, and pointing out to the conceited helmsman his incompetence, which would only earn him crude insults. He has to learn how to adjust his movement to the rolling of the craft, otherwise he will fall and excite much Schadenfreude. I have paid great attention to this and have not fallen. Had I fallen I would not have rejected the hand of him who had tripped me in order to pick me up, but that hand I would never have kissed.¹⁹

In a few months, however, the brilliant and independent royal adviser fell ill, and though only 46, would not last long. On 1 February 1798 Friedrich Gentz wrote to a friend:

Mencken now directs all internal administration. Since he is now extremely sunken and will certainly be torn from us all too soon, you will readily see how much enticement such a career offers to an active, ambitious and self-confident man.

Gentz had to decide whether to stay in post and hope that his fame, charm, and ‘parlour skills’ would end by earning him Mencken’s post or to try something else. He decided not to remain:

I am not made for banging away at cabals. I have a fear of the military which is not to be subdued, and if the king should put his entire trust in me today, I should certainly go to pieces in less than half a year.²⁰

Anastasius Ludwig Mencken died on 5 August 1801, not yet 50 years old. Freiherr vom Stein, who knew him and used many of his position papers and unfulfilled reform schemes for his own programme in 1807, described his predecessor in glowing terms: ‘liberal in thought, cultivated, refined in sentiment, a benevolent man of the noblest caste of mind and views.’²¹ Mencken, an excellent, gifted and charming senior civil servant, died on the threshold of a great career. He stood at the very apex of power under a young insecure King who preferred to delegate matters rather than to pretend to be Frederick the Great. If Mencken had lived?

Had he lived, Wilhelmine, his younger child and only daughter, would never have married so undistinguished a person as Ferdinand von Bismarck. Engelberg argues that

Ferdinand von Bismarck contracted no misalliance by marrying Louise Wilhelmine Mencken but a social symbiosis. The country gentleman who at Schoenhausen was only a Lieutenant (ret.) won greater social prestige by this marriage.²²

That cannot be right. In Jane Austen’s county society in 1800 or Wilhelmine Mencken’s Berlin, a young woman with not enough money had little choice. As Hedwig von Bismarck drily observed, Wilhelmine ‘lacked the “von” before her name or money in her purse’ and could, of course, not go to court.²³ Thus a very intelligent and beautiful 17-year-old girl married a dull country gentleman eighteen years her senior. It was not a recipe for either a happy marriage nor for a contented life as mother and home-maker. And Wilhelmine Mencken had neither. An acquaintance of Bismarck’s mother, who lived to a great age, Frau Charlotte von Quast Radensleben told Philipp zu Eulenburg years later what kind of person Wilhelmine Mencken became:

[she] adopted a curiously serious expression when she spoke about his mother. She shook her fine old head and said, ‘Not a pleasant woman, very smart but—very cold’.²⁴

A child who loses a parent at an early age—and Wilhelmine was 12 when Anastasius died—never recovers completely. Though no evidence survives, she must have mourned her brilliant, successful father for the rest of her life and for the glamorous life that died with him. We can see that she wanted her sons to fill that void. Here is how she expressed it to Bismarck’s older brother Bernhard in 1830, poor decent Bernhard, a chip off his father’s block:

I imagined that my greatest good fortune would be to have a grown son, who, educated under my very eyes, would agree with me, but as a man would be called to penetrate deeper into the world of the intellect than I as a woman could do. I rejoiced in the thought of the intellectual exchange, the mutual encouragement for mental and spiritual engagement, and of that satisfying feeling to have such pleasures with a person who would be through the bonds of nature nearest to my heart, and who, still more, through the kinship of the spirit, would draw ever closer to me. The time for these hopes to be fulfilled has arrived but they have disappeared and unfortunately, I must confess, for ever.²⁵

Not a nice letter to get from your mother. We don’t know how Bernhard felt but we know that Otto ‘hated’ her. He blamed her for sending him to the Plamann Anstalt, even though it had a very good reputation and had its inspiration in the gymnastic doctrines ofTurnen, made famous by Turnvater Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (1778–1852). He told the story of his awful six years there again and again to von Keudell, to Lucius von Ballhausen, and repeated it in old age in his memoirs. There are many versions. Here is the one that Otto Pflanze quotes:

At the age of six I entered a school whose teachers were demagogic Turner who hated the nobility and educated with blows and cuffs instead of words and reproofs. In the morning the children were awakened with rapier blows that left bruises, because it was too burdensome for the teachers to do it any other way. Gymnastics were supposed to be recreation, but during this too the teachers struck us with iron rapiers. For my cultivated mother, child rearing was too inconvenient and she freed herself of it very early, at least in her feelings.

And even the food was awful: ‘meat of a chewy kind, not exactly hard but impossible for the teeth to soften.’²⁶

Bismarck loved his ‘weak’ father and hated his ‘strong’ mother. Otto Pflanze speculates that

Some of Bismarck’s habits and attitudes in later years may have stemmed from these early experiences: his contempt for men dominated by wives; his dislike of intellectuals (‘professor’ was for him an epithet); his hostility towards bureaucratic government and suspicion of Geheimräte (his maternal grandfather’s career); his late rising (pupils at the Plamann Anstalt were driven out of bed at 6.00 a.m.); his longing for the country and dislike of cities, especially Berlin; and his preference in agriculture for forestry (he never forgave his mother for ordering a stand of oak trees felled at Kniephof).²⁷

The evidence about Bismarck’s life that I have seen certainly supports Pflanze’s suggestions. Pflanze had become a committed Freudian the longer he worked on Bismarck and used the oedipal mechanism very effectively to explain Bismarck’s growing hypochondria, gluttony, rage, and despair. That Bismarck’s health, temper, and emotional life deteriorated the more successful he became has been one of the most striking findings of my research on his career. His vices grew more vicious; his virtues less effective the longer he exercised the sovereignty of his powerful self. That self had been shaped, possibly deeply damaged in childhood. The death of the father for a girl like his mother or the coldness or absence of a mother for a male child like Bismarck inflicted permanent psychic wounds on both figures. Wilhelmine Mencken suffered from hypochondria like her son, had sensitive ‘nerves’, and needed to go away for long periods to take cures at fashionable spas. Her son’s hyphochondria was as gargantuan as his appetite. What are we to make of the fact that Bismarck confessed that ‘as a small child I hated her; later I successfully deceived her with falsehoods’ or that he urged Bernhard to do the same: ‘Don’t write too crudely to the parents. The Kniephof establishment is more susceptible to lies and diplomacy than to soldierly coarseness’?²⁸ How had she frightened the child so thoroughly that he dared not tell her the truth? We do not know.

By an uncanny set of circumstances, Bismarck ended up in a kind of permanent parental triangle with his sovereigns, not just once but twice. He saw William I of Prussia as a kindly but weak man and his Queen and later Empress Augusta as an all-powerful, devious, and malevolent figure. Nor were these feelings concealed. Here is an example which Lady Emily Russell, the wife of the British Ambassador in Berlin, passed on to Queen Victoria on 15 March 1873. She reported to the Queen the ‘exceptional favour conferred upon us’ when the Emperor and Empress had dined at the British Embassy, which was a

high distinction which no other Embassy has ever yet enjoyed in Berlin … Your Majesty is aware of the political jealousy of Prince Bismarck about the Empress Augusta’s influence over the Emperor, which he thinks stands in the way of his anti-clerical and National policy, and prevents the formation of responsible ministries as in England. The Empress told my husband he [Bismarck] has only twice spoken to Her Majesty since the war, and she expressed a wish that he should dine with us also. According to etiquette he would have had to sit on the left side of the Empress, and Her Majesty would then have had an hour in which he could not have escaped conversing. Prince Bismarck accepted our invitation but said he would prefer to set aside etiquette, and cede the ‘pas’ to the Austrian Ambassador. However, on the day of the dinner and a short time before the hour appointed, Prince Bismarck sent an excuse saying he was ill with lumbago. The diplomatists look mysterious and hint at his illness being a diplomatic one. Prince Bismarck often expresses his hatred for the Empress in such strong language that my husband is placed in a very difficult position.²⁹

The other royal triangle evoked in Bismarck even more violent feelings of hatred. Bismarck repeated over and over that Victoria Crown Princess of Prussia ruled her husband, the Crown Prince Frederick, and, if I am right about the Crown Prince’s state of depression, the rumours may well have been right. On 1 April 1888, a few weeks after the death of Kaiser William I and the succession of the Emperor Frederick and his Empress Victoria, Baroness Spitzemberg

threw on my finery and went with the children to wish the Princess B good luck … My dear Prince who had greeted me, ‘Ah, dear Spitzchen, what are you doing?’ took me to the table. To my right sat old Külzer. I ‘interviewed’ [English in original—JS] the Prince impudently … [Bismarck said] ‘My old Master was aware of his dependence. He used to say, ‘help me, you know how hen-pecked I am’, and so we operated together. For that this one [Frederick—JS] is too proud but he is dependent and submissive to an extent that is not to be believed, like a dog. The painful thing is that one has to remain in spite of it perfectly polite instead of intervening with a ‘damn it all!’ This battle wears me down and the Emperor. He is a brave soldier but on the other hand he is like those old moustached sergeants whom I have seen creep into their mouse-holes in fear of their wives … The worst was … ‘Vicky’. She was ‘a wild woman’. When he saw her pictures, she terrified him by the unrestrained sexuality, which speaks through her eyes. She had fallen in love with the Battenberger and wants him near her, like her mother, whom the English call ‘the selfish old beast’ [English in the original—JS] holds onto her brothers, with who knows what sort of incestuous thoughts.³⁰

This disgusting, misogynist, and prurient outburst can hardly be called ‘normal’. It and the many other examples, which clutter Bismarck’s conversation, would make interesting material for a Freudian case study. Bismarck was physically ill more and more of the time as he aged. Its causes were certainly as much psychic as physical. I believe that when Bismarck said to Hildegard Spitzemberg, ‘this constant resistance and the constant punch bag existence wears me down’, he meant it and he was right. For twenty-six years, he found himself in the position of the desperate and furious son in a parental triangle, in which the ‘parents’—the Emperor and Empress—had in fact literally absolute power over him. The Emperor could dismiss Bismarck at any moment but the old Emperor never did, the younger Emperor Frederick, was too ill to do it, and the youngest, Kaiser William II, with whom Bismarck could only pose as grandfather, very quickly did. Is it not also possible that Bismarck skilfully exploited the royal triangle by playing the ‘weak’ father off against the ‘strong’ mother? And that some element of ‘personal dictatorship’ emerged out of his deep ambivalences about his own parents?

When I began the work on this biography, I saw Bismarck’s constant resignation threats, his long stays away from Berlin, his illnesses and hypochondria as in part ingenious tactics to get his way and they were undoubtedly that too. Now I see more clearly that the psychic triangle between a ‘weak’ emperor and a ‘strong’ empress must have given Bismarck constant pain as if his political fate required that a wounded psychic muscle be twisted again and again to a point beyond endurance. When Dr Ernst Schweninger arrived in 1884, Bismarck’s gluttony, physical symptoms, and chronic sleeplessness were about to kill him. Schweninger treated the Iron Chancellor by wrapping him completely in warm, damp towels and by holding his hand until he fell asleep. Is it fanciful to see that as a surrogate for the warmth of a loving mother?

In 1816 the Bismarck family moved to the Pomeranian estate of Kniephof, which Ferdinand had inherited from the distant relative we mentioned above. It was a bigger estate but had a less developed village and was further from Berlin. During the 1820s Ferdinand transformed the economic basis of his estates from cereal to cattle. Bismarck always preferred the woods of Pomerania to the flood plains of Schönhausen.³¹ The child Bismarck loved Kniephof and, as he told von Keudell on a journey to Leipzig in 1864:

up to the age of six I was always in the fresh air or in the stables. An old cowherd warned me once not to creep around under the cows so trustingly. The cow, he said, can tread on your eye. The cow notices nothing and goes on chewing, but the eye is then gone. I have often thought about that later when people, without noticing it, do harm to others.³²

At 6 he went to the Plamann Institute and suffered for another six years. From there, on 27 April 1821, we have the first written testimony (I cannot reproduce the quaint spelling) but the quality of the prose attests to the standards of the Institute. Not many 6-year-olds would be able to write this:

Dear Mother, I have happily arrived marks have been given out and I hope you will be pleased. A new springer has come who can do tricks on horseback and on foot. Many, many greetings and so stay as well as you were when we left you. I am your loving son Otto.³³

The second piece of Bismarckian prose from Easter 1825 shows how much progress the young scholar had made in four years:

Dear Mother,

I am very healthy. There will now be as every year promotions. I have been put in the second class in sums, in natural history, in geography, in German, in singing, writing and drawing and in gym. Send us quickly a plant drum so that when we go out to collect plants, we can put them in it. The strict teacher has gone away and a new teacher named Kayser has come. Also one student has gone. The new course has begun. Mr and Mrs Plamann are well. Be well and write soon and greet everybody from your true son Otto.³⁴

In 1827 Bismarck’s life improved. At the age of 12 he went to the Friedrich Wilhelm Gymnasium in Berlin. From 1830 to 1832, he moved to the Grey Cloister Gymnasium also in Berlin; I cannot say why he moved schools but his final school report contained the rubric diligence: ‘sometimes irregular, school attendance lacked the constant and expected regularity’.³⁵ He and his brother lived in the family’s townhouse at 53 Behrendstrasse in winter with their parents, and in the summer on their own with a housekeeper and a household schoolmaster.

In July 1829 when the two brothers were separated, Otto wrote Bernhard the following letter from Kniephof and, even if I allow for the fact that the writer is only 14, the tone and the vividness of the prose mark the debut of one of the best letter writers of the nineteenth century:

Tuesday we had a big crowd here. His Excellency the Sack (the Provincial President), the bank man Rumschüttel (who did nothing but taste wine), Colonel Einhart and so were here. Little Malwine [Bismarck’s young sister—JS] begins to look quite personable and speaks German and French, whichever occurs to her … She still remembers you very well and says over and over ‘Do Bennat also come’. She was really pleased when I arrived. They are building a lot in the distillery and they are adding a new house with cellars, the former stable will be a dwelling. The day labourers will move to the sheep pen and where they live now.

Carl will get a house. I have worked a terrible amount. In Zimmerhausen, I shot a duck.³⁶

The following summer, Otto wrote Bernhard about a rural comedy in Kniephof:

On Friday three promising young fellows, an arsonist, a highwayman and a thief, escaped from the local jail. The whole neighbourhood swarmed with patrols, gendarmes and militia. People feared for their lives. In the evening the Kniephof Imperial Execution Force, which consisted of 25 militia-men, marched forth against the three monsters, armed as well they could with muskets, flints, pistols, and the rest with forks and scythes. Every crossing point over the Zampel was occupied. Our military men were paralysed with fear. If two units met, they called out, but they were so terrified that the others did not reply. The first unit ran where they could and the other crept behind the bushes.³⁷

Needless to say, the ‘promising young fellows’ were not caught.

On 15 April 1832 Bismarck got his abitur, the prized higher school certificate, which entitled the bearer to enroll at a university. On 10 May 1832 Bismarck matriculated at Göttingen ‘studiosus of the laws and science of statecraft’.³⁸ The Georgia Augusta University of Göttingen had been founded in 1734 under George II, Elector of Hanover and King of England, and rapidly became the centre of the ‘English Enlightenment’ on the continent. Göttingen would not be on first glance the ideal university for a young Junker like Otto von Bismarck, but there were other attractions as Margaret Lavinia Anderson explains: ‘What gave Göttingen life its peculiar character was the dominance of the aristocracy. … the promenades of Göttingen were bright with self-styled romantic heroes, conspicuous in velvet frock coats, rings and spurs, flowing locks and long moustaches, and accompanied by the inevitable pair of bulldogs.’³⁹

Göttingen may have attracted Bismarck for that reason, but John Lothrop Motley, a gifted upper-class Bostonian, came for the learning associated with it and found it wanting. In 1832 he wrote home to Boston:

at all events it is not worth one’s while to remain long in Göttingen, because most of the professors who were ornaments of the university are dead or decayed, and the town itself is excessively dull.⁴⁰

Motley shared the same birthday as Bismarck but was a year older. Like his friend he came from a social class in which one knew everybody. He corresponded for years with Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., knew Emerson and Thoreau, and, because of those connections, became US Ambassador in Vienna and later in London without ever having had any serious diplomatic preparation. A gifted linguist, he spoke perfect German, learned Dutch, and wrote a monumental multi-volume history of the Dutch Republic for which he became famous in his lifetime. It had become fashionable in the 1820s and 1830s for upper-class Americans like Motley and well-placed young Englishmen to spend a few years in German universities, which had begun to exercise a powerful attraction on advanced opinion. The great William Whewell, mathematician, philosopher, and long-time Master of Trinity College, Cambridge, learned about Naturwissenschaft (natural sciences) and the new type of serious university in Germany and tried to push Cambridge to imitate it. Lytton Strachey in Eminent Victorians describes the Tractarian the Revd Edward Pusey, friend of Newman and Keble, as a man of wealth and learning, a professor and a canon of Christ Church, ‘who had, it was rumoured, been to Germany’.⁴¹ Strachey plays here on the contrast between staid Oxford clergymen of the proper sort in the late 1820s and 1830 and uppity young men like Pusey ‘who had been to Germany’ and came back full of the new theology and Bible criticism.

Motley had no such aspirations but he did do something remarkable; he wrote a novel about life in a German university. The American National Biography Online dismisses it in a sentence: ‘Motley’s first novel, Morton’s Hope, a historical romance, also appeared in 1839. The little critical attention it received was negative: it was condemned for its flawed plot, diction, and characterization.’ I agree that Morton’s Hope has its limits but it has one precious virtue, Otto von Bismarck, thinly disguised as Otto von Rabenmarck, plays the main role. Here we have a remarkable portrait of Bismarck as a student and of the place where he studied.

Motley first met Bismarck as a 17-year-old freshman along with fellow students from Göttingen, who had begun ‘eine Bierreise’, a beer-drinking trip, the object of which was to get ‘smashed’ in as many German cities as possible. Here is the picture Motley/Morton gives us:

Rabenmark was a ‘fox’ (the slang term for a student in his first year), who had been just challenging the veteran student to drink. He was very young, even for a fox, for at the time I write of, he was not yet quite seventeen, but in precocity of character, in every respect, he went immeasurably beyond any person I have ever known … His figure was slender, and not yet mature but already of a tolerable height. His dress was in the extreme of the then Göttingen fashion. He wore a chaotic coat without collar or buttons, and as destitute of colour as of shape; enormously wide trousers and boots with iron heels and portentous spurs. His shirt-collar, unconscious of cravat, was doubled over his shoulders and his hair hung down about his ears and neck. A faint attempt at moustachios, of an indefinite colour, completed the equipment of his face, and a huge saber strapped around his waist, that of his habiliment. As he wrote Von before his name, and was descended of a Bohemian family, who had been baronized before Charlemagne’s time, he wore an enormous seal-ring on his fore-finger with his armorial bearing. Such was Otto von Rabenmark, a youth who in a more fortunate sphere would have won himself name and fame. He was gifted with talents and acquirements immeasurably beyond his years.⁴²

Even then young Bismarck stood out. Several months later, Motley took a walk through the city and reported that

all along the street, I saw, on looking up, the heads and shoulders of students projecting from every window. They were arrayed in tawdry smoking caps, and heterogeneous-looking dressing gowns with the long pipes and flash tassels depending from their mouths.⁴³

Motley/Morton then ran into Rabenmark walking his dog, Ariel. Both man and dog are dressed outlandishly and, when a group of four students laugh, von Rabenmark challenges three of them to duels and the fourth who insulted the dog is forced to jump over Rabenmark’s stick like a dog. They go back to Bismarck’s rooms. Morton notes the plain furniture and that ‘the floor was without carpet and sanded’. The walls were covered with silhouettes:

a peculiar and invariable characteristic of a German student’s room;—they are well executed profiles, in black paper on a white ground, of the occupant’s intimate friends, and are usually four or five inches square, and surrounded with a narrow frame of black wood. Rabenmarks’s friends seemed to be numerous, for there were at least a hundred silhouettes, ranged in regular rows gradually decreasing by one from the bottom, till the pyramid was terminated by a single one, which was the profile of the ‘senior’ of the Pomeranian club … The third side of the room was decorated with a couple of ‘schlägers’ or duelling swords, which were fastened cross-wise against the wall.⁴⁴

‘There’, said Rabenmark, entering the room, unbuckling his belt, and throwing the pistols and schläger on the floor. ‘I can leave my buffoonery for a while and be reasonable. It’s rather tiresome work, this renommiring [gaining reputation or renommée—JS] … I am a fox. When I came to the university three months ago, I had not a single acquaintance. I wished to introduce myself into the best Landsmannschaft [a duelling society—JS], but I saw little chance of succeeding. I have already, however, become an influential member. What course do you suppose I adopted to gain my admission?’

‘I suppose you made friends of the president or senior, as you call him, and other magnates of the club.’ Said I.

‘No, I insulted them all publicly and in the grossest possible manner … and after I had cut off the senior’s nose, sliced off the con-senior’s upper lip, moustachios and all, besides bestowing less severe marks of affection on the others, the whole club in admiration of my prowess and desiring to secure the services of so valorous a combatant voted me in by acclamation … I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life. You see I am a very rational sort of person now and you would hardly take me for the crazy mountebank you met in the street half-an hour ago. But then I see that this is the way to obtain superiority. I determined at once on arriving at the university, that to obtain mastery over my competitors, who were all, extravagant, savage, eccentric, I had to be ten times as extravagant and savage as any one else …’ His age was, at the time of which I am writing, exactly eighteen and a half.⁴⁵

Erich Marcks, who in 1915 published the first full biography of Bismarck which used interviews with the living Bismarck seems to have been one of the few German biographers actually to have read Morton’s Hope. He concluded that ‘out of the features of the Göttingen student Rabenmark, Bismarck stands out with unmistakable accuracy; his experience, his appearance, his way of speaking shimmer through’.⁴⁶ Marcks also reports that Bismarck in three semesters engaged in twenty-five duels.⁴⁷ Yet the really interesting fact about Morton’s Hope escapes Marcks. He thinks only of Bismarck, not of Motley. How remarkable both men must have been, the one to inspire, and the other to write, a biography or a biographical novel about the young man. Even at 18 Bismarck had a special aura. Motley makes it absolutely clear that this young man ‘in precocity of character, in every respect, … went immeasurably beyond any person I have ever known.’ Motley saw another important attribute in his friend, he saw ‘a very rational sort of person … I see that this is the way to obtain superiority and that I intend to lead my companions here, as I intend to lead them in after-life.’ Bismarck’s urge to rule and dominate others by the force of his personality stood out even at the age of 18. Later in his political career he chose conflict over compromise in most situations, as if conflict had a cleansing or clarifying property by drawing the lines between friends and foes more sharply or defining the possible courses of action.

At Göttingen Bismarck clashed with authority very often. Göttingen, like Cambridge in the nineteenth century, had its own courts and applied Karzerstrafe (jail sentences) in the university jail to unruly students who had been caught by the Pedells (in Cambridge they were and still are known as the ‘Bull Dogs’).⁴⁸ Bismarck naturally got into trouble and had to serve a sentence. How literally such incarceration was taken I cannot say but we know that he wrote to the Rector of Göttingen in the spring of 1833:

Your Magnificence had the goodness to postpone the Karzerstrafe imposed on me until after my return from the Michaelmas holiday. Now a further recurrence of my illness, the end of which is not foreseeable, requires me to remain in Berlin and continue my studies here since such a long journey would further weaken my already weakened constitution. For this reason I beg Your Magnificence most obediently to allow me to serve my sentence here and not in Gottingen. Your Magnificence’s most obedient Otto von Bismarck, stud. jur.⁴⁹

We know quite a lot about Bismarck’s state of mind and plans through a series of lively letters he wrote to his ‘Corps Brother’ (the duelling fraternity ‘Pomerania’) Gustav Scharlach (1811–81). The first touches a familiar undergraduate problem but does it with Bismarck’s literary extravagance:

There have been uncomfortable scenes with the Old Man, who absolutely refuses to pay my debts. This puts me into a misanthropic mood … The deficit is not so bad because I have huge credit, which allows me to live in a slovenly way. The consequence is that I look sick and pale which the Old Man will, of course, ascribe, when I go home for Christmas, to a lack of means of subsistence; then I will make a scene and say to him I would rather be a Mohammedan than suffer hunger any longer, and that will solve the problem.⁵⁰

The next letter has become justly famous for its wit, style, and brilliant caricature. Bismarck describes to Scharlach what will happen to him if he opts not to go into the bureaucracy but to go home to run one of his father’s estates. If Scharlach visits him in ten years he will find

a well-fed Landwehr [militia—JS] officer with a moustache, who curses and swears a justifiable hatred of Frenchmen and Jews until the earth trembles, and beats his dogs and his servants in the most brutal fashion, even if he is tyrannized by his wife. I will wear leather trousers and allow myself to be ridiculed at the Wool Market in Stettin, and when anyone calls me Herr Baron, I’ll stroke my moustache in good humour and sell two dollars cheaper. On the King’s birthday I’ll get drunk and shout ‘Vivat!’ and in general get excited a lot and my every word will be ‘on my honour!’ and ‘a superb horse!’. In short I shall be happy in my family’s rural circle, car tel est mon plaisir.⁵¹

The vignette of the typical Junker country squire is a perfect miniature, dashed off in a letter to a friend and has justly become famous. The writer at that time had a week earlier celebrated his nineteenth birthday. When Bismarck opted for politics, German literature lost a fine comic novelist.

The third in this set of letters to Scharlach explains his career plans and dates from early May 1834. In it he announces his intention to sit the state examinations and hence

to exchange the honourable estate of candidate in law with that of a royal civil servant, that is, Referendar at the Berlin Municipal Court. My plan is to stay here for a year, then go to the Provincial Government in Aachen; after the second year to sit the diplomatic examination and then to leave to the grace of destiny which will render me utterly indifferent whether one sends me to Petersburg or Rio Janeiro … You will, alas, find in this letter my old habit of talking a lot about myself. Do me the pleasure of imitating this and fear not for that reason the slightest shadow of vanity.⁵²

At this time, a chance encounter changed his life. In the summer of 1834 he met Lieutenant Albrecht von Roon, a brilliant young officer and graduate of the prestigious Kriegsakademie (the Prussian War College). When the General Staff finally became fully operational in the 1820s, it developed an elaborate project to survey and make maps of the terrain of the Kingdom of Prussia, a tradition, which continued to the Second World War. (The University Library at Cambridge has a complete pristine set of thousands of Wehrmacht maps, so detailed that it is possible to locate landmarks necessary for operations by squads or platoons.) The topography section of the General Staff employed gifted young officers too poor to pay for their own horses and equipment and hence unfitted for immediate assignment to regiments as general staff officers. By an interesting irony, the two generals—Moltke and Roon—who marched in triumph on either side of Bismarck in the parade down Unter den Linden of June 1871 to mark the victory over France and the unification of Germany, had both spent important years in the topographical unit. Arden Bucholz notes that, like Roon, Moltke took part in the great topographic project under Chief of the Great General Staff Karl Freiherr von Müffling.

Neither Roon nor his wife Anna had any capital and even in the early 1850s lived the life of a simple regimental Commander. As his son wrote, ‘they were basically living on his salary.’⁵³ In the summer of 1834 Lieutenant von Roon was hard at work in the fields and forests of Pomerania, surveying and sketching the landscape for the topography. He invited his nephew Moritz von Blanckenburg to help him and to bring a friend. Moritz brought his best friend, the 19-year-old Otto von Bismarck. The two lads accompanied von Roon on his project in the morning and went hunting in the afternoons.⁵⁴ The young Bismarck, who so dazzled his contemporary Motley, must have made an impression on the officer twelve years his senior, who was later to make Bismarck minister-president of Prussia. The link—as so often in Junker Prussia—tied them through the familial net and also through ‘service’ in the army.

For reasons not entirely clear (Marcks suggests that, since Bismarck fell ill in his last semester at Göttingen, it seemed prudent to study nearer home),⁵⁵ Bismarck moved to Berlin where he spent the winter of 1833–4 and at some point changed his matriculation from Göttingen to the University of Berlin. Motley joined him there and a third friend, Alexander von Keyserling, completed the trio. Engelberg calls Motley and Keyserling Bismarck’s ‘good spirits’.⁵⁶ Lothar Gall puts it more strongly—‘The American was one of the few real friends that Bismarck had in his life’—and suggests further that Motley introduced Bismarck to Byron, to Goethe, to Shakespeare, and the full flower of German romantic art.⁵⁷ Not much of it took. Pflanze points out that Bismarck never showed much interest in the cultural awakening that made Germany between 1770 and 1830 the intellectual capital of the world. He notes that Bismarck was essentially unaffected by his classical education, by German idealism, by the new historicism, by romanticism, by the great era of German musical composition.⁵⁸ Hegel left him cold, ditto Schopenhauer. He had nothing to do with either left or right Hegelians, seems not to have cared much for Schelling, Fichte, or most of the romantic poets. But there was one major exception: Friedrich Schiller mattered to Bismarck and even more to the soldiers: to Roon, to Manteuffel, to Wrangel, but interestingly not to the cool Moltke.

Bismarck certainly knew his Schiller well but he preferred the lyric poets with a sense of humour. Baroness Spitzemberg recorded the following conversation in December of 1884, as she sat with Bismarck in his ‘corner’:

After dinner he smoked and leafed through a volume of Chamisso’s poems, which together with Uhland, Heine, Rückert he treats himself to so that he can have copies in every one of his residences. ‘When I am really irritated and exhausted, I prefer to read the German lyricists, they cheer me up’.⁵⁹

In May 1835 Bismarck sat successfully the first stage of the legal examinations to enter the Ministry of Justice. As he wrote to Scharlach in July of that year:

I have just returned from several weeks of leave in the countryside and have hurled myself back into the duty of bringing to light and punishing the crimes of the Berliners. This high duty to the state, which in my case consists of the mechanical function of taking the minutes, began promisingly but only tolerably while it was new. Now that my beautiful fingers begin to curve under the burden of the constantly moving pen, I wish most ardently to serve the commonweal in some other capacity.⁶⁰

In the spring of 1836 he took time off to prepare for the second examination and this time went to Schönhausen, which he describes in his usual mocking tones:

For the last four weeks I sit here in this old, cursed manor house with its pointed arches and four metre-thick walls, some 30 rooms in which two have as furnishing splendid damask tapestries, the colour of which can just about be seen on the shreds of cloth that remain, masses of rats, fireplaces in which the wind howls, in the ‘old castle of my fathers’, where everything which is suitable conspires to maintain a real spleen. Next to it is a splendid old church. My room looks out on the churchyard, and on the other side onto one of those old gardens with trimmed hedges of yew and fine old lindens. The only living soul in these crumbling surroundings is your friend, fed by and cared for by a dried-out old house maid who was a childhood playmate of my 65-year-old father. I prepare my exams, listen to the nightingales, target shoot and read Voltaire and Spinoza’s ethics, which I found bound in beautiful pigskin in the library here.⁶¹

The complexity of this piece of prose needs a word. Bismarck elevates Schönhausen to the ‘old castle of my fathers’. In fact, pictures show that the house has an absolutely typical medieval wing with steeply slanting roof and small windows. Next to it a grander late seventeenth- or early eighteenth-century range, three stories high with two plain pilasters running from ground up to the roof, again a modest tiled roof, no pediment and a pleasant curved, baroque arch over the door. Dozens of rural estates would have looked that way and obscure squires, who had enjoyed a good harvest, would add very similar ‘noble’ wings. The ‘castle’ has become a ruin in Bismarck’s heavy romantic irony, a sentimental and faintly absurd haunt of aristocratic decay, and there alone sits the Byronic young man attended by a hag. The self-dramatization, the pleasure in the word painting, the exaltation of his aristocratic inheritance, and the exuberance of the writing create a powerful impact. It lacks the earlier earthy fun of the ‘fat Junker’ letter but it suggests that Bismarck has arrived at a new stage in self-dramatization. After all, the place is not a joke but his claim to status in a hierarchical, aristocratic society. He bore the name of the place. He was a Bismarck-Schönhausen, as opposed to the other branches of the Bismarck family with different estate names. Hence its elevation to something from Scott’s Ivanhoe. This word mastery marks his long career. He became the Bismarck we know because he had a powerful personality and because he could write with such artistry.

In the meantime, he had got fed up with working for the city courts and decided that law would never do, so he applied to be allowed to take the second examination not for the legal profession but for the diplomatic service. Here he needed the permission of the Foreign Minister, who happened to be Jean Pierre Frédéric Ancillon, former tutor to the young Crown Prince Frederick William IV. Through that happy pedagogic employment Ancillon rose to be Foreign Secretary of the Kingdom. Ancillon was a highly cultivated academic and a relative of Friedrich Gentz on his mother’s side. What Motley wrote about Vienna in the 1860s applied even more so to the much smaller Prussian society: ‘They are all related to each other, ten deep. It is one great family party of 3 or 300.’⁶² Ancillon had no very high opinion of the Junker class in general and the young Bismarck in particular and suggested that he should look to something more homespun: the customs service or duty in another domestic capacity. Bismarck got his older brother to pull strings and thus gained the sponsorship of Count Arnim-Boitzenburg, the district president of administration in Aachen in the Prussian Rhineland.⁶³ But even that connection got him nowhere. In the end Bismarck had to settle for the domestic civil service, which involved facing the second legal examination but this time not in boring Berlin but in Aachen where his patron controlled the local administration.

Aachen, known usually in English as Aix-la-Chapelle, had much to recommend it. The westernmost city in Germany and the ancient capital of Charlemagne’s empire, it had many fine monuments and romantic ruins. It also had a flourishing spa. Aachen advertises itself today as ‘the city with the hottest springs north of the Alps’, with temperatures between 45°C and 75°C. These springs were the reason Charlemagne chose Aachen as the political centre of his empire. ‘Darumb er dann zu Aach sich geren nidergelassen, und von dess warmen Bad daselbst wegen Wohnung gehabt.’ (Thereupon he settled in Aach and from the warmth the same had dwelling.)⁶⁴ The spa, the history and the location made it an ideal tourist attraction and certainly attracted the young Bismarck, a handsome 22-year-old, six foot four, slender, a fine linguist who spoke really good English and was utterly, utterly charming. Bismarck took the exams to be admitted to the administrative service, which he passed with distinction, swearing the oath of the civil servant in July 1836.⁶⁵

The year and a bit in Aachen proved emotionally turbulent and very expensive.

Bismarck neglected his work, was frequently absent, and twice (at least) in love. In June of 1836 he wrote to Bernhard and described a trip on the way to Aachen with

a very strong English party … The trip gave me great pleasure but cost me a lot of money … If one does not weaken at home and let me have a small gratification, I do not see how this can sensibly work out. Then to live here without cash is simply impossible.⁶⁶

Engelberg, who published his two-volume biography in the German Democratic Republic five years later than Gall, makes use of ten Bismarck letters between 30 June 1836 and 19 July 1837 that were omitted from the Complete Works. The letters show the hero of German unification in a less than flattering light. There was, first of all, Bismarck’s ruthless exploitation of his patron, Adolf Heinrich Count von Arnim-Boitzenburg. Arnim-Boitzenburg was born on 10 April 1803 in Berlin and had enjoyed a meteoric rise in the Prussian administrative bureaucracy. At the age of 30 he had already reached the high position of Regierungspräsident (provincial governor), a post which normally marked the pinnacle of a Prussian administrator’s career, and was only 33 when he took over at Aachen. He later went on to hold cabinet office and was briefly prime minister during the turbulent years of the Revolution of 1848.⁶⁷ As we shall see, by 1864, he had begun to feel ‘reservations’ about his client’s policies. In 1836, Count Arnim-Boitzenburg could not have been more accommodating. He gave Bismarck special treatment and allowed him to move from section to section ‘on account of my following the diplomatic career path unlike the other trainees’,⁶⁸ a ‘career path’ which Foreign Minister Ancillon had categorically not permitted.

Bismarck used the time to fall in love. By 10 August he was writing to his brother that he was utterly overwhelmed: ‘to describe how much in love would leave the wildest oriental hyperbole an inadequate measure’. The Duke and Duchess of Cleveland and their niece Laura Russell

and a long tail of authentic Britons who examined me with their lorgnettes when His Grace of Cleveland bade me for the first time to have a glass of wine with him and with that worthiness and elegance characteristic of me, I poured a half gallon of sherry under my waistcoat.⁶⁹

On 30 October Bismarck wrote to Bernhard that the Duke and Duchess had departed with Laura, with whom I am ‘as good as promised’ but he let her go without making it official. He started to gamble to recoup the debts incurred by living all summer in high society and had considered suicide, ‘I put aside for this purpose a cord of yellow silk which I have reserved for its rarity just in case.’⁷⁰ On 2 November he wrote to Bernhard to say that their father had sent him money but with recriminations.⁷¹ By 3 December 1836 he had discovered that the beautiful Laura was not the niece of the Duke of Cleveland but a child of a previous indiscretion of her mother’s who had only been the Duchess for two years and was a commoner. He was now convinced that he had been manipulated and that behind the lorgnettes the English were laughing at him. ‘They were saying: “look there that tall monster, that is the silly German baron whom they have caught in the woods, with his pipe and his seal-ring”.’⁷²

I see no sign of Bismarck feeling ‘dissatisfaction with himself and an inner emptiness’ or that Bismarck was ‘in flight and sought distraction’, as Lothar Gall does.⁷³ Instead, I see every sign of a proud, fatuously self-confident, provincial gentleman swept away by the wealth and style of the English aristocracy, so incomparably richer and more confident than the rural squires who made up the Prussian Junker class. English country houses like Felbrigg Hall in Norfolk, home of an untitled gentry family, the Wilsons, were bigger, grander, and more impressive than most of the palaces of reigning German princes, and the Wilsons were much, much richer than any equivalent Prussian family. Robert Walpole’s Houghton Hall with its hundreds of rooms, exceeded any royal palace in Germany except for the Habsburgs of Vienna and the Walpoles were merely Norfolk squires who through Sir Robert Walpole had made money in the government service.

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography shows how desperately out of his class young Bismarck was. Here is an extract from the entry:

William Harry Vane, first duke of Cleveland (1766–1842), … left almost £1 million in addition to huge estates, around £1,250,000 in consols, and plate and jewels to the value of a further £1 million.⁷⁴

If we use the exchange rate of 1871 of £1 = 6.72 thaler, then the Duke of Cleveland’s realizable fortune, without valuing the lands, amounted to £3,250,000 or 21,840,000 thaler.⁷⁵ If the Duke lived frugally on the income of ‘gilts’ (or consols) only at, say, 3 per cent per annum, he would have had an annual income of £37,500 or 252,000 thaler. When Bismarck became Prussian delegate to the Bundesrat in 1851, he had an income of 21,000 thaler.⁷⁶ The Duke of Cleveland must have had an income at least twenty times that of one of the highest-paid Prussian civil servants in the mid-nineteenth century. A 22-year-old country squire, dazzled at the prospects before him, could not entertain the Duke’s party in a suitable manner without going into inconceivable amounts of debt. No wonder he considered ‘suicide’, in October 1836, after the Duke’s party with Laura had left Aachen.

He recovered and by July of the next year, he could write to his brother to say that he was ‘again on fire’, this time a conflagration lit by Isabella Lorraine-Smith, another beautiful English woman ‘with blonde hair and incredible beauty’.⁷⁷ It was a repeat of the previous summer with Bismarck hosting champagne dinners, incurring debts, and overstaying his leave. Once again he thought he had become engaged. On 30 August 1837 he wrote from Frankfurt to his friend, Karl Friedrich von Savigny, that he had grounds for that belief:

For the last few days I find myself here with my family (an expression I beg you to consider absolutely confidential). [He asked Savigny to send his dress uniform to Geneva from Aachen.] It would make me very happy if you could be present at my wedding which will probably take place at Scarsdale in Leicestershire. For the moment please tell the Aachen friends that I have gone home to hunt for two months.⁷⁸

The father of the beautiful Isabella could not compete with the Duke of Cleveland. Mr Lorraine-Smith was Rector of Passenham in Leicestershire, and a well-to-do man with lands in three counties but even before the Frankfurt letter, as he wrote to his brother, Bismarck had begun to get cold feet about the prospect of ‘plunging into the hell-fires of a narrow, bourgeois marriage’. His future father-in-law drew an income from the living of Passenham, which would end with his death.

With my shortage of funds, I do not think I can take a wife who brings less than £1,000 a year, and I am not sure whether L. is willing or even able in the long run to give so much … How do you like these calculations from the pen of somebody who considers himself to be very much in love?⁷⁹

One can see now why the devout editors of the Gesammelte Werke left these ten letters out. He had behaved despicably from beginning to end. He had abused the generosity of Count von Arnim-Boitzenburg. He had lived absurdly, had fallen in love with Laura Russell but got out of it as soon as he heard of her illegitimate birth, about which even he had signs of remorse:

What must poor Laura think of me, when I fell in love with her as the niece of a Duke and turned my back on her as soon as I heard that she had the misfortune to come into the world in a so-so way?⁸⁰

He had then repeated the comedy at a lower level with Isabella but shrunk from his engagement either because of his own monetary considerations or because the Revd Lorraine-Smith had seen through him. He had been absent without leave for months on end and done no work. He had been ruled by his pride and had spent a fortune to save face. Even the long-suffering Arnim-Boitzenburg had finally had enough. He declared that with heavy irony the trainee’s conduct was

no longer appropriate … I can only approve your previously mentioned decision to transfer to one of the royal provincial administrations in the old Prussian provinces where you will be able to return to more intensive engagement which you have desired to find in vain under the social circumstances of life in Aachen.⁸¹

Bismarck returned to Potsdam and began work again in the civil administration.

In January 1838 Bismarck wrote to his father that he had been trying to evade military service, another letter which the guardians of the flame omitted from the official publication of Bismarck’s collected works. He told his Father that he had not yet begun his military service because he made ‘one last attempt’ to get out of his one-year military service in the reserves ‘as a result of muscular weakness which I explained came from a sword-cut under the right arm which I feel when I lift it (!); unfortunately the blow was not deep enough.’⁸² Social life could not compare with Aachen but he had been put on the list of garçons who were invited to balls by Prince Frederick (1794–1863) and by the Crown Prince.

At the end of September 1838 Bismarck wrote to his father from Greifswald, where he had been stationed as an army reservist, that he had begun to study agriculture at the university and in the agricultural college. He included a copy of a letter he wrote to Cousin Caroline von Bismarck-Bohlen, ‘my picture book beautiful cousin with whom—I mention in passing—I am utterly in love’, who begged him to continue his career.⁸³ He copied out the long letter to Caroline for his father and later made a copy for his fiancée Johanna von Puttkammer. Engelberg notes that ‘the very fact that he sent it to several addresses, makes it a key document in his development, but above all its content. It is a masterpiece of family diplomacy.’⁸⁴ It seems fairly certain that he decided to leave his potentially brilliant career in the civil service because the burden of his huge and still growing debts oppressed him. In July he visited his mother in Berlin who was now terminally ill and poured out his heart. He told her how miserable he was and begged her to help him find some better position, how his life had become unbearable, the work disgusted him, and how the prospect of spending his whole life to end up a Regierungspräsident on 2,000 thaler a year filled his great soul with despair. Wilhelmine in turn wrote to Ferdinand who then decided to make over the three Pomeranian estates to the two sons and to withdraw to Schönhausen. By running one of his father’s estates he would generate income, live at home, reduce his living costs, and avoid the temptations to gamble and spend conspicuously.⁸⁵ Of course he could tell nobody in the family about what actually happened in Aachen so he raised the decision to leave the civil service onto a higher plane. The letter—four pages long—contains one of the most often quoted paragraphs Bismarck ever composed:

The activity of the individual civil servant among us is very rarely independent, even that of the highest, and for the rest their activity confines itself to pushing the administrative machinery along the tracks already laid down. The Prussian civil servant resembles a player in an orchestra. He may be the first violin or play the triangle; without oversight or influence on the whole he must play his part, as it is set down, whether he think it good or bad. I will make music, which I consider good or none at all.⁸⁶

The reality of his debts continued to plague him. On 21 December 1838, he wrote a grovelling letter to his friend Savigny and apologized for not yet paying him back the

sum that for years you have had a right to expect. In the next few days I will come to Berlin myself in the hope that I can do in person what I have not achieved in writing, that is, raise some money, which we both doubtless urgently need.⁸⁷

The year 1839 began badly. On New Year’s Day Wilhelmine Bismarck died just short of her fiftieth birthday. For the previous three years, his mother had been suffering with an undiagnosed growth, which got progressively worse in 1838. The sources are extraordinarily silent about the woman who so profoundly influenced his life. We can only speculate in a vacuum.

At Easter 1839 Bismarck took up residence in Kniephof and became a full-time farmer. Kniephof was a large estate farmed by Instleute with contracts with the lord, a form of rural employment, which resembled the metayer in France, the mezzadro in Italy, or the ‘share cropper’ in the American south. In the Prussian case the abolition of bodily servitude, that is, serfdom, had transformed the relations between lord and land worker and in the 1830s and 1840s the ‘increasing commercialization of many regions … led to every more frequent demands about unpaid bills for sales or services’.⁸⁸ The money economy was turning traditional contracts into relations of the market for labour. Instleute were not hired labour nor fully free of traditional ties either.⁸⁹ Since 1800 Prussian agriculture had been in a process of increasing professionalization. Agricultural colleges of the kind that Bismarck attended in Greifswald spread, and productivity of agriculture had risen even against the trend of a long depression which followed the end of the Napoleonic wars and did not finish until the early 1850s. Pflanze provides useful figures on agricultural growth and productivity. The population of Prussia grew between 1816 and 1864 from 23,552,000 to 37,819,000 or by 59 per cent. The area under cultivation in the same period rose from 55.5 per cent of the land area to 69.3 per cent, an increase of 24.8 per cent but yield per acre increased by 135 per cent.⁹⁰ Bismarck worked hard and began to get results. The trends were moving in his direction.

Although his correspondence with his brother in these years concerns farming, Bismarck now moved into a world dominated by the old Pomeranian noble families, with names which were to play a central part in his career: Dewitz, Bülow, Thadden-Trieglaff, Blanckenburg, von der Osten, von der Marwitz, Wartensleben, Senfft von Pilsach, and others. Hartwin Spenkuch in his book on the Prussian House of Lords put the Pomeranian nobility, according to figures used for the reorganization of the House of Lords in 1854, at the top of the list of knightly estates (Rittergüter) with more than 100 years in the same family.⁹¹ Bismarck took up his position as an estate owner with some enthusiasm. As Erich Marcks wrote, ‘he had the power to command his lands and his people and the need to obey nobody. He wrote “Lordship” on protocols when bailiffs or pastors or schoolteachers came before him as judge with their complaints. He judged and acted to police his decisions.’⁹² He joined his fellow Junker landowners on local and county committees. In spite of all that, the size of the estates meant that the distance between one manor house and another was considerable and he spent a good deal of the time alone, reading and often drinking too much. He hunted with his neighbours and they came to hunt on his lands. Robert von Keudell, who later became one of Bismarck’s trusted aides, had taken a post as a junior lawyer in the provincial court at Cöslin. He heard and recorded stories of Bismarck’s crazy goings-on from an elderly Herr von der Marwitz-Rützenow who knew Otto well. Von der Marwitz described Bismarck’s simple hospitality whenever he had stopped over in Kniephof. He would put out a bottle of strong beer and one of champagne and would say in English ‘help yourself’. There would be a simple snack with a lot to drink and much conversation. He was already inventing a more appropriate past. Herr von der Marwitz recalled him saying

In his youth he had wanted to be a soldier but his mother had wanted to be able to salute him as a well-heeled government councillor. For her sake he spent many years in the Justice and Administrative service but found it not to his taste. After her death, he came to the district and enjoyed the freedom of the country life in big drafts.⁹³

One night after a long journey, Herr von der Marwitz and a friend showed up unannounced at Kniephof. Bismarck welcomed them, set out the usual fare, and the visitors and their host sat late and drank a lot.

He apologized in advance that he would not be able to see them at breakfast because he had to be in Naugard by 7 a.m. The guests needed to go there too and, though Bismarck strongly urged them to sleep as late as they liked, they eventually agreed that Bismarck would wake them at 6.30 in the morning. They drank on and eventually went to bed. The friend said to von der Marwitz, as they climbed the stairs to the guest room, ‘I have had more drink than I am used to and I want to sleep it off tomorrow morning.’ ‘You can’t do that,’ Herr von der Marwitz said. ‘Wait and see,’ replied the friend who pushed a huge chest of drawers against the door. At 6.30 in the morning, Bismarck knocked at the door. ‘Are you ready?’ No sound from the room. Bismarck turned the doorknob and pushed the door against the heavy chest. A few minutes later he called out from the courtyard. ‘Are you ready?’ No sound from us. Two pistol shots crashed through the window-glass and knocked plaster onto my friend, who crept to the window and stuck a white handkerchief out on the end of a stick. In a few minutes we were downstairs. Bismarck greeted us with his usual heartiness without a word about his little victory.⁹⁴

His behaviour as a host helped to earn him the title of ‘the mad Junker’ and stories like the one above, which spread through the county, multiplied as Bismarck behaved with his usual extravagance. He rode like a madman and had many accidents, which also became legendary. His pistol stories, his occasional romances, his extravagant conversation, and unconventional views became the talk of the county society. Keudell visited Moritz von Blanckenburg, who had known Bismarck from childhood and ran into him again at the Grey Cloister gymnasium. Moritz recalled that even in school he was a ‘puzzling person. I never saw him work. He went for long walks but still knew everything and always had the homework ready.’⁹⁵

The ‘mad Junker’ was lonely, restless, and dissatisfied behind the public bravado. He had begun to feel the need for something deeper in his life. He took long trips. One to England in 1842 he described in a letter to his father. He went to York and Hull and took the train to Manchester to see ‘the largest machine factory in the world’. England delighted him and, of course, he spoke excellent English after his two years living with or close to Motley. ‘The politeness and kindness of the English exceeded my expectations … even the common people are well-behaved. They look modest and understanding when you speak.’ He was surprised how relatively cheap hotels and meals were.

This is country for heavy eaters … They serve huge breakfasts with many cuts of meat and at noon comes fish and an atrocious fruit tart. Soups are so strongly seasoned with white and black pepper that few foreigners can eat them. They never serve by the portion because even at breakfast the most colossal pieces of every sort of meat are available and they put them before you to cut as much or as little as you choose without effect on the bill.⁹⁶

When he was not travelling, as he wrote to his father, ‘I am so bored I could hang myself when I am alone at Kniephof.’⁹⁷ In August of 1844 he went on holiday at Norderney, and wrote his father a superb description of the boat trip in a thunderstorm. He met for the first time the two people who would most influence his life in the future: Crown Prince Wilhelm of Prussia and his Princess Augusta, who had been born Augusta Marie Luise Katharina von Sachsen-Weimar-Eisenach. He had a pleasant time with them on the beach. He drew vivid word pictures of the long list of gentle-folk present. Bismarck paid particular attention to the young women, one of whom was described as having ‘good trotters’.

Mornings either before or after bathing we play bowls with huge balls. The rest of the time we divide up among playing whist and pharo, mockery and flirting with the women, walking on the beach, eating oysters, shooting rabbits and evenings an hour or two of dancing. A monotonous but healthy way of life.⁹⁸

His private letters from 1843 reveal a kind of desperation: this huge man with his fierce, undirected ambition, his spectacular and extravagant behaviour, his tremendous urge to dominate, and his dread of boredom, resembled a massive engine with a steam boiler at highest pressure and the wheels locked by cast-iron breaks. He was also lonely and at 28 presumably sexually frustrated as well. On the other hand, he recalled only too well the humiliations and folly of his English affairs. On 10 September 1843 he wrote to a friend,

I love contact with women but marriage is a dubious proposition and my experiences have made me think twice. I feel partly comfortable, partly bored and very chilled in my spirits, and as long as I can hold out, I will … I am toying with the idea of playing the Asian for a few years to bring a change in the stage design of my comedy, to smoke my cigars on the Ganges rather than the Rega.⁹⁹

That his life had become a drearily staged ‘comedy’ speaks volumes. A month later he wrote to his father to report on developments at Kniephof and explained that he had imported forty day-labourers from the Warthe swamp

who work much better than our people and help with ploughing but they cost much more. But in the view of the rain I don’t know how we would have lifted the potatoes without them … Greet Malwine and come whole and healthy to see me. I am bored to the point of hanging myself.¹⁰⁰

At the end of the month of October 1843 he confided to his old friend and future brother-in-law, Oskar von Arnim-Kröchlendorff (1813–1903), that his financial affairs had

gradually begun to find a baseline … When I am on my own, I get bored which I suppose must happen to every young, reasonably educated man in the country who is unmarried and relies on the society of a more numerous than interesting clique of Pomeranian squire-bumpkins, Philistines and Ulan officers.¹⁰¹

Boredom often drove him to the neighbouring estate of his childhood playmate, Moritz von Blanckenburg, where he met Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff, Moritz’s fiancée. His boredom and emptiness appalled her. On 7 February 1843 she wrote to Moritz:

I have never seen anybody express his lack of faith or rather pantheism so freely and clearly … his bottomless boredom and emptiness … He was very upset, was sometimes red in the face but could not get anywhere … a certain shyness before the blue haze of his image of God.¹⁰²

This was the beginning of one of the most important relationships of Bismarck’s life. Meeting Marie brought him together with a remarkable young woman with whom he fell instantly and hopelessly in love. Had she been free, he might never have unified Germany, no matter how ridiculous that may sound. She had strength but of a kind that never threatened him. She saw through his extravagant façade and pitied him. She too fell in love with him, as this letter to one of her closest friends, Elizabeth von Mittelstädt, from May 1843, suggests with its disparaging judgement of her fiancé, Moritz von Blanckenburg:

Otto B no longer shows his face in Zimmerhausen; very good because dear, good Moritz could not survive the comparison. That he stays away out of magnanimity I do not believe but because he has something else in mind.¹⁰³

Marie von Thadden and Elizabeth von Mittelstädt belonged to an important group of aristocratic Pietists, Christian believers who in America are known as ‘born-again’ Christians. Marie von Thadden’s serenity and strength came from her deep faith in the saving power of Jesus Christ, a power which worked directly on the souls of men, if they would just believe in him. She was the daughter of one of the founding members of the Junker version of Pietism who in 1813 in the ‘Christian German Table Club’ began meeting in Mai’s Inn in Berlin. The members soon gained the nickname of the ‘Maikäfer’ (May bugs). The main members were von Alvensleben-Erxleben, Gustav and Heinrich von Below, Leopold and Ludwig von Gerlach, Cajus Count Stolberg, Count Voss, Friedrich Wilhelm Count von Götzen, Adolf von Thadden-Trieglaff, and the Crown Prince Frederick William. Adolf von Thadden-Trieglaff, Marie’s father, Ernst von Senfft-Pilsach, and Ludwig von Gerlach married three sisters Henriette, Ida, and Auguste von Oertzen.¹⁰⁴ These men later became Bismarck’s ‘first political party’ and created the platform for everything that followed. They took him up after his ‘conversion’ and made him—understandably—their polemical sword. Nobody in their ranks could use the profane weapons of wit, commanding presence, brilliance, and literary elegance better than Otto von Bismarck. He became, they thought, the scourge of the ungodly. They were wrong. Bismarck served nobody, neither man nor God but only himself. That discovery in the 1870s tore from him the closest friends and mentors of his youth and left him desolate, and as lonely again as he had been in the 1840s.

The impact of the defeat of Prussia in 1806 and the occupation of the kingdom by the ‘Godless’ Napoleon had driven many of the great Junker landlords back to Christianity. They rejected Enlightenment rationalism, the horrors of Jacobin fanaticism, the doctrines of equality, the guillotines, but also Frederick the Great’s cynical contempt for religion. Though they came out of Lutheran Protestantism, they rejected the official ‘walled’ churches and like all Evangelicals looked for the stirrings of God’s grace not in the Holy Sacraments of the Roman Catholic or Lutheran Churches but in the motions of their own hearts.

In The Politics of Conversion: Missionary Protestantism and the Jews in Prussia 1728–1941 Christopher Clark traces the peculiarly Lutheran variant of this general Evangelical movement. German Pietism combined evangelical inwardness and preoccupation about salvation through grace alone with organized and very Prussian institutions. The German Neo-Pietists often said mass in homes or in the open air. They communed with simple bread and wine as the early Christians had done. They observed the Sabbath and dedicated themselves to works of charity. Since the Hohenzollern dynasty had been Calvinist since 1603 but the majority of their subjects remained firmly Lutheran, the Pietists with their thrift and discipline became a group from whom the monarchs recruited efficient and pliant civil servants. These Christians brought no baggage of ancient Lutheran claims to feudal rights.

Junker Pietists formed their own missionary society. In January 1822 the Berlin Society for the Promotion of Christianity among the Jews was founded by General Job von Witzleben. The von Witzleben family produced fourteen Generals between 1755 and 1976, one of whom, Field Marshall Job-Wilhelm Georg Erwin von Witzleben, was executed for his part in the plot to assassinate Hitler in 1944.¹⁰⁵ Hitler ordered that he be hanged from a butcher’s hook and filmed in his final agonies so that the Führer could relish the death of a Junker aristocrat who had tried to kill him. His ancestor, Job von Witzleben, had been since 1817 chief of the King’s Military Cabinet, an office of the highest importance. The Allgemeine deutsche Biographie describes von Witzleben’s position in these words:

There was no issue of importance—whether it concerned the army, the State, the Church or the royal family—which was not discussed by them. Witzleben’s opinion had great weight in the resolution of such questions … For twenty years he was the most powerful subject in the state.¹⁰⁶

Other founders included Johann Peter Friedrich Ancillon, whom we have already met as tutor to the Crown Prince and as the Prussian Foreign Minister in 1832 who prevented Bismarck from entering the diplomatic service. The reader will recognize the same names as in the Christian German Table Society and among the Pietists with whom Bismarck now began to associate, such as Marie’s father, Adolf von Thadden-Trieglaff, or Ernst von Senfft-Pilsach, and the Gerlach brothers.¹⁰⁷

The milieu in which the members of the Christian nobility moved combined neo-Pietism with millenarian hopes for the conversion of the Jews as a sign that ‘the end of days’ had at last arrived. Their high status, personal connections with the Crown Prince, and the depth and sincerity of their convictions gave them a cohesiveness that could make them into a political movement when the right moment came. When Bismarck fell in love with Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff, he could not, of course, have known it, but he had taken a step on which his entire career and subsequent life hinged. The members of the Christian German Table Society, the Society for the Conversion of the Jews, and his Evangelical Pomeranian neighbours held office across the spectrum of the army and bureaucracy. Their number contained future court officials and generals. When the Crown Prince Frederick William came to the throne in 1840, he brought Bismarck’s new friends to power with him and, when the unrest leading to the revolutions of 1848 broke out, his neo-Pietist friends would make Bismarck famous. It was also through Marie that he met Johanna von Puttkamer, his future wife.

Through the Pietists Bismarck came to know Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach (1795–1877), intellectually one of the most important figures among the group, and a very important person in Bismarck’s career. In 1835 Gerlach became Deputy Chief Judge of the Superior Provincial Court in Frankfurt an der Oder. There he gathered round him the smartest and most interesting young lawyers. Privy Councillor Schede recalled:

In the Collegium of the County Court he was surrounded almost completely by opponents but as a Jurist he had gradually accustomed them to his direction. He had a firm hand on the reins. Nothing gave him more pleasure than to argue a case with well-trained young lawyers, but they could never prevail against his mind and his gifts. It was a joy to listen to him. In his home the impression of the significance of his personality and the unity of his character and life were even more powerful. I have never met anybody who had such a massive personal impact.¹⁰⁸

The romantic poet, Clemens Brentano, said of him: ‘Ludwig was for me from the first moment a frightening figure.’ Herman Wagener, one of Bismarck’s closest collaborators and first editor of the famous Kreuzzeitung, the daily newspaper closest to the Prussian aristocracy, was also a Referendar (legal trainee) in Gerlach’s court, as was ‘little Hans’ von Kleist-Retzow, Bismarck’s friend. From 1842 both Wagener and Kleist went to the theological evenings which Ludwig organized and which Ludwig’s brother, Colonel Leopold von Gerlach, then Chief of Staff of the III Army Corps, also attended.¹⁰⁹ Leopold, later General Adjutant to King Frederick William IV, and his brother Judge Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach became in the late 1840s Bismarck’s political patrons and managers. They had direct access to the King. In 1851 they convinced the King to appoint a 37-year-old ‘mad Junker’ with no diplomatic experience, a reputation for violent and extravagant gestures, too clever by half, and of dubious character, to the second most important diplomatic post in Germany, Prussian Ambassador to the German Bundesrat or Federal Council in Frankurt. The Gerlachs ‘made’ Bismarck and Leopold in particular saw Bismarck as ‘his’ creature. That was an error of historic proportions. When Bismarck began to reveal his true objectives and methods, they discovered that they had put an opponent of theirs into power. Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach became a sworn enemy of Bismarck in the late 1860s. In 1874 Bismarck dismissed his old master from his post as a judge on Prussian High Court Judge without a second thought.

This was the milieu that Marie von Thadden and her fiancé Moritz von Blanckenburg moved in. It attracted Bismarck powerfully both as he fell under the spell of the beautiful Marie and came to meet the powerful Junker neighbours who had firm and pleasingly reactionary views. Bismarck would have recognized at once the chance that this group offered him, but it came at a personal price. As a result, Bismarck stayed away from Marie in 1844 but his mood worsened. On 7 February 1844 he complained to his sister: ‘Nothing to report from here … I feel more and more how alone I am in the world.’¹¹⁰ In desperation he returned to the civil service in Potsdam but could not bear it more than a few weeks. In late May he wrote to Karl Friedrich von Savigny from Naugard to say his sister-in-law had died suddenly and he had to go to his brother’s place:

Would you be good enough to go to my apartment and collect the government stuff for Bülow? … Forgive me if I rely on your good will in this request but it was you who tempted me to Potsdam and you must now bear the consequences.¹¹¹

In August 1844 he wrote to his university friend Scharlach and summed up his situation:

For the last five years I have lived alone in the country and have with some success dedicated myself to the improvement in my credit, but I can no longer bear the lonely country Junker life and struggle with myself whether to occupy myself in state service or to go on long journeys. In the meantime I applied for a post in the provincial government, worked for six weeks but found the people and the duties as shallow and unsatisfying as before. Since then I have been on leave, and row without will on the stream of life without any rudder beyond the impulse of the moment and am completely indifferent about where it throws me up on the shore.¹¹²

On 4 October 1844 Bismarck travelled to Zimmerhausen to attend the wedding of Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff and Moritz von Blanckenburg. It was a memorable day in all sorts of ways. Moritz had long wanted to introduce Otto to ‘little Hans’ von Kleist-Retzow. On 3 September 1844 Hans Kleist had just passed his third and final law exam with distinction and had gone in high spirits to the Blanckenburg/Thadden wedding. Moritz introduced Otto and Hans having told each that the other was deaf so both shouted at each other for a long time until Moritz had pity on them. Hermann von Petersdorff, ‘little Hans’s’ biographer, observes that ‘thus the most important and significant friendship of his life begins with symbolic significance. The day would come when the two really did not understand each and the practical joker of 4 October 1844 could not contribute to their mutual understanding.’¹¹³ The wedding ended disastrously. The family had ordered a fireworks display, which got out of hand and destroyed in a big fire much of the village of Zimmerhausen.¹¹⁴ A bad omen.

Hans von Kleist-Retzow was undoubtedly the only really close friend that Bismarck made after his friendship with Motley and Keyserling. Hans was born on the family estate in Kieckow on 25 November 1814. The Kleist-Retzow family was ‘by far the most powerful in Kreis Belgard’ and owned in 1907 about one-fifth of the estates in the district.¹¹⁵ As a child he had wanted to be a missionary and the persecution of the Old Lutherans by the royal government, which upset him very much, kept that urge alive. Unlike Bismarck’s Pomeranian friends, Hans remained a devout but Orthodox Lutheran.¹¹⁶ At 14 he went to the Landesschule Pforta, the best classical gymnasium in Prussia, which, rather like Dr Thomas Arnold’s Rugby School in exactly the same years, was governed by twelve student Inspektoren. At Rugby they were called Praeposters. There his best friend was Ernst Ranke, younger brother of the great historian, Leopold von Ranke. Hans hated the idea of becoming a soldier. His biographer writes that he had ‘a creeping horror of the soulless existence of the parade ground’ and refused to serve, ‘which caused his father to shed “bitter tears”’,¹¹⁷ understandably when we recall that 116 von Kleists served Frederick the Great in the Seven Years War from 1756 to 1763, of whom 30 died in battle or subsequently from wounds and disease.¹¹⁸ In May 1835 he matriculated in Berlin University for three semesters and lived with Ernst Ranke,¹¹⁹ who remembered that he began each morning with a reading of the Greek New Testament. In December 1836 Kleist matriculated in Göttingen, where he rose at four each morning to study the bible, a daily practice which he tried without success to impose on Bismarck. When he met Bismarck, he had already spent three years as a Referendar in the Superior Civil Court in Frankfurt an der Oder under Ernst Ludwig von Gerlach but unlike many others he had admired but not worshipped the Master. He was elected Landrat, the Prussian chief administrator of a country district, in 1845 for Kreis Belgard, a county of 20 square miles with about 31,000 inhabitants and one substantial village, the town of Belgard, which had 3,327 inhabitants.¹²⁰ He, also unmarried, settled down to the life of a rural squire.

In April 1845 Bismarck wrote to his sister Malwine, now married to Oskar von Arnim-Kröchelndorff, that things were getting desperate:

Only with difficulty can I resist the urge to fill an entire letter with agricultural complaints: night frosts, sick cow, bad rapeseed and bad roads, dead lambs, hungry sheep, lack of straw, fodder, money, potatoes, and dung … I must—the Devil take me—marry. That has become absolutely clear to me. Now that father has gone away, I feel lonely and abandoned, and mild, damp weather makes me melancholy, full of yearning, and love-sick.¹²¹

Bismarck—now that Marie was married—began to visit Zimmerhausen again and not without an impact on Marie. In May 1845, she wrote to her friend Elizabeth von Mittelstädt:

Otto has become much closer to me in these days than for weeks. We have reached out our hands to each other, and I think, that it is not a temporary contact. You have never understood that I see so much behind his often cold elegance so it may appear laughable to you that I have reached out for such a friendship, but it occupies me too much these last days for me to pass over it in silence. Perhaps it is the expression of a personal freedom, which makes so attractive this friendship with a Pomeranian phoenix, who is a prodigy of wildness and arrogance.¹²²

In July 1845 Marie von Thadden wrote to Johanna von Puttkamer that the group had read Romeo and Juliet with Bismarck present,

Can you believe it? Ademar [code name for Bismarck] read the lover to me [as Juliet]. I don’t think it was a trick of our host but just chance … I had so many truths to express, all of which came from the soul that I forgot everything which might have made me embarrassed, even the indecent parts, which we agreed before hand—through Moritz’s intervention—to leave out.¹²³

Marie von Thadden-Trieglaff was all of 23 when Bismarck, just over 30, played Romeo to her Juliet. She was a beautiful, intelligent, and deeply pious young woman. She had met nobody like Bismarck and that was hardly surprising. There was nobody like him. The two letters suggest pretty clearly that Marie and Otto were in love and also engaged in a struggle for his immortal soul. The latter struggle—the Christian mission—may have made it tolerable for Moritz von Blanckenburg, Bismarck’s friend and Marie’s husband, to allow the relationship to deepen. But what did Johanna von Puttkamer think then and, more importantly, think later?

A few months after the play reading Ferdinand von Bismarck fell ill and his son Otto rushed to Schönhausen to care for him. As he wrote to his sister at the end of September 1845, to describe their Father’s illness, there was a blockage in his throat, which prevented him from taking food and the doctors had to put tubes down his throat.

The way he is being fed that I have described is too artificial and uncertain to allow us to have any hope for him unless he regains in greater measure the ability to swallow naturally. … [Bismarck stayed with him] for it would be miserable for the old man to spend his last few weeks alone and without a member of the family by him.

On 22 November 1845 Ferdinand von Bismarck died.¹²⁴ Bismarck had no choice but to move to Schönhausen to run the estate after his father’s death and Bernhard took over Kniephof. The relationship with Marie continued to deepen. In April 1846 Bismarck wrote a long letter in rhyming couplets to accompany a pile of poetry books and apples from his orchard. Here are the first three couplets of a very long, elegant, and ironic poem in rhyming verse.

Am letzten Dienstag sagten Sie,

Es fehlte mir an Poesie

Damit Sie nun doch klar ersehen

Wie sehr Sie mich da misverstehen

So schreibe ich Ihnen, Frau Marie,

In Versen, gleich des Morgens früh.¹²⁵

Tuesday last you said to me

That I was lacking poetry

That you may now quite clearly see

How much you have mistaken me

Madame Marie I write to you

Verses fresh with morning dew.

[trans.—JS]

A few weeks later, he wrote another letter, full of his charm and literary self-awareness:

Dear Frau Marie,

About to depart, I have just received from Schönhausen a package of green beans, which I cannot completely use up. Regard them, please, not as a sacrifice, which I withdraw from the Moloch which dwells within me, if I lay them at your feet. I include some marjoram and the long promised Schönhausen normal bread, in addition Lenau Part II and some Bech, the pages of which you may cut. Some more I cannot add because for the moment my mind fills itself with field drainage and bog cultivation. Rereading this letter I note three ‘somes’ in three lines but in an amazing way no ‘probably’. Thus one improves. Be well and pass my compliments, if I may ask you, to anybody whom you choose.¹²⁶

Four months later, Marie von Thadden-Blanckenburg died on 10 November 1846, aged 24. Bismarck was shattered in a way that neither the death of his father nor his mother had evoked. He wrote to his sister that he had been startled by the horror of losing somebody from his immediate circle:

If anything were needed to make the decision to leave Pomerania easier, this was it. This is really the first time that I have lost somebody through death, who was close to me and whose passing leaves an unexpected hole in my circle of life … This feeling of emptiness, the thought never again to see or hear a dear person who had become necessary to me—and of those I have few—was so new that I cannot get used to it and the whole event has not yet become real to me. Enviable is the confidence of the relatives. They think of this death as an early journey, which in the long or short run will be followed by a joyful reunion.¹²⁷

Hans Kleist and Bismarck tried to comfort Moritz after Marie died, as Moritz recalled in a letter to Hans von Kleist forty years later:

There we sat, the three of us, you, Otto and I as the cold northeast wind blew, on three stools with our legs stretched out onto the kitchen hearth.¹²⁸

The death of Marie triggered a series of decisions in Bismarck’s life. On 18 November, scarcely a week later, Bismarck signed a contract giving Herr Klug the tenancy of Kniephof. Klug had formerly been tenant of Pansin. Next he decided to marry Marie’s friend, Johanna von Puttkamer. On 16 December 1846, Bismarck wrote the famous Werbebrief (suitor letter) to Heinrich von Puttkamer asking for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Oceans of ink have been poured by previous biographers in their attempts to make sense of this letter. Had Bismarck really become a Christian, indeed a Pietist, and what relationship had this account of his conversion to his subsequent ruthless use of power? Those are interesting questions but more interesting—and less considered—is why Johanna wanted to marry Bismarck. She must have known and seen with her own eyes Bismarck’s passion for her friend. She had neither good looks nor Marie’s intellectual interests. Bismarck would not send her books of philosophy.

Johanna von Puttkamer was born on the family estate of Reinfeld in remotest Pomerania, hard by the Polish border, on 11 April 1824, so she was just 21 when she got to know Bismarck through her friend Marie. Her family was—even among the Pietists of Pomerania—well known for their extreme severity. She had an elder brother who died in childhood and thus she grew up as an only child. Pictures of her as a young woman show her with a long face with prominent jaw. She was the daughter of a country squire on a remote estate in a remote region and had never seen much of the great world.

What Johanna may have thought, we do not know, but in any case on 21 December 1846, Otto von Bismarck wrote to Heinrich von Puttkamer the famous Werbebrief:

I begin this letter by stating from the outset its content: it is a request for the highest which you have to grant in this world, the hand of your daughter … What I can do is to tell you with complete openness about myself … and especially my relationship to Christianity … At an early age I was estranged from my parental home and never felt fully at home thereafter. My education was dictated by the intention to develop my understanding and the early acquisition of positive knowledge. After an irregularly attended and imperfectly understood religious instruction, I was baptized by Schleiermacher in my 16th year and had no other faith than naked deism which soon became mixed with pantheistic tendencies … Thus without any control other than the conventional social limitations, I plunged into the world, partly seducer and partly seduced, and into bad company …

He claims that it was the ‘loneliness after the death of my mother, which brought me to Kniephof … [where] the inner voice began …’. Through Moritz von Blackenburg, he came into contact with the Trieglaff circle:

and found there people who made me ashamed … I felt myself soon at home in that circle and with Moritz and his wife who became dear to me as a sister to a brother, and discovered a well-being which I had never experienced before, a family life that included me, a home at last … I felt bitter regret over my previous existence … The news of the death of our dear friend in Cardemin, provoked the first sincere prayer without reflections about the reasonableness of the act that I had ever expressed and tears which I had not shed since my childhood. God did not hear my prayer but He did not reject it either. For I have not lost the ability to pray since that time and became aware of something not exactly peace but a will to live as I had never before known it … What value you place on the change of heart hardly two months old I cannot say …

He asks only to be allowed to come in person to Reinfeld and plead his case.¹²⁹

After years of knowing that such a letter had been written, I approached it in the expectation that I would find the confessions of a ‘born-again’ Christian. The letter makes no such claim. Indeed it says very little about Bismarck’s state of soul or relationship to God. On the face of it, we cannot say why Herr von Puttkamer acceded to Bismarck’s request. Shortly after New Year 1847, Herr von Puttkamer replied affirmatively but asked very properly for some firm commitment to a new Christian life from a possible son-in-law. Bismarck replied on 4 January,

You ask me, honoured Herr von Puttkamer, whether my feet have taken certain steps. I can only reply in the affirmative to your next question, that I am firmly and in many ways determined to pursue that peace with all and that sanctification without which no one can see the Lord. Whether my steps are as secure as I would want them to be, I am not in a position to say. I see myself rather the lame person who without the help of the Lord will stumble.

He could not come right away because his duty as dyke captain would continue as long as the Elbe threatened to overflow. ‘It is the first time in my life, I think, that I yearn for a hard frost.’¹³⁰

On the 12th day of January 1847 Otto Leopold Edward von Bismarck-Schönhausen was officially engaged to Johanna Friederike Charlotte Dorothea Eleonore von Puttkamer. On the same day he dashed off a note to Malwine von Arnim, his sister, which simply said ‘All Right’.¹³¹

The months of the engagement overlap with the beginning of the rumbles of the revolution of 1848 and Bismarck’s debut as a politician. Since Bismarck now had important things to do, he had to write Johanna and write he did. He poured out his heart in dozens of rich, long letters, each with a different and more extravagant form of address in English, French, or Italian—‘Giovanna mia’, ‘dearest’, ‘Jeanne la méchante’, because she had not written, long quotes from English poets, Byron, Moore, etc. ‘en proie à des émotions violentes’. It is in this period that he wrote the long letter about his mother and father, which I quoted earlier. The letters bubble with wit and extravagant romanticism, as in a letter from March 1847 on

the long standing rule of conservatism in this house, in which my fathers for centuries have lived in the same rooms, were born and died, as the pictures in the house and the church show, from iron clanging knights to the cavaliers of the Thirty Years War with their long locks and twisted beards, then to the wearers of the huge allonge wigs who strutted round the halls in their red heels and the riders with the neat pony-tails who fought in Frederick the Great’s war down to the enfeebled youth who lies at your feet.¹³²

A month later he described life at his future in-laws in a letter to his sister:

As far as my person is concerned, I feel pretty well except for a light headache which my mother-in-law maintains in that she pours a strong Rhine wine for me at all hours of the day in the sincere conviction that I was nursed and raised on fermented drinks and that I need a quart or two to get through the day. In general I find myself in a state of comfort that I have not had for years and live for the day with the carefree abandon of a student.¹³³

On 8 May 1847 Bismarck wrote to his fiancée with important news:

Dearest, only, beloved, Juanita, my better half [English in the original] I want to begin my letter with every form of endearment I can imagine because I need your forgiveness very much; I will not leave you to guess why, lest you imagine something worse, but simply say that I have been elected to the Landtag … One of our deputies, Brauchitsch, is so ill that he cannot attend the meetings … Now, since among the six deputies the first position was vacant, the Magdeburg estates ought to have moved the second into the first spot and then elect a new sixth, instead quite unusually they elected me to the first position though I am new in the county and was not even an alternate deputy.¹³⁴

The new Bismarck had emerged—the politician. From that moment to her death in 1894 Johanna would have to suffer his long absences, his tensions, and preoccupations as Bismarck for the first time found his true calling. By violating the rule of the ballot, the electors of Magdeburg had launched the career of the greatest statesman of the nineteenth century and Johanna von Puttkamer lost her husband’s full attention even before they had formally been married.

What was Bismarck’s Johanna like as a person? Friedrich von Holstein saw her for the first time when he arrived at the St Petersburg embassy in 1861.

Frau Bismarck, like her husband, was a peculiar person. The only attraction she could boast was a pair of arresting dark eyes. She had dark hair too, which revealed the Slav origins of the Puttkamer family. She was entirely devoid of feminine charm, attached no importance to dress, and only lived for her family. She exercised her quite considerable musical talent merely for her own enjoyment, though Bismarck liked to listen when she played classical music such as Beethoven. In society her speech and behaviour were not always appropriate but she moved with a calm assurance, which prevented her from ever appearing ill at ease or unsure of herself. Her husband let her go her own way. I never once saw him take her to task.¹³⁵

A female observer met Johanna von Bismarck for the first time a few years after Holstein had. Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Spitzemberg (b. 20 January 1843), was 20 and not yet married to Carl von Spitzemberg when she went with her father, the former Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Württemberg, Friedrich Karl Gottlob Freiherr Varnbüler von und zu Hemmingen (1809–89), on his first official call on the new Prussian Minister-President in June 1863:

On our return we found an invitation to tea, so we threw on our best clothes and drove to 76 Wilhelmstrasse. Frau von Bismarck, a woman in her early forties, tall with dark hair and beautiful brown eyes, received us in a very friendly way and in her entire manner so plain and confiding that we soon felt ourselves very much at home. Later her husband appeared, a very tall handsome man, with an energetic, almost defiant expression on his face. They seem to have an open house …¹³⁶

The next day they called on the Bismarcks again and Hildegard wrote in her diary:

The whole tone of the house is very plain, natural, and refined and it pleased me very much. After dinner father and Bismarck got involved in political discussions in which they both became very deeply involved …¹³⁷

We must pause now to get to know the first of the important Bismarck diarists. Hildegard Spitzemberg—as a Freifrau she is conventionally titled ‘Baroness’—belonged to that rare category of people, the true diarist. Clever, well read, sensitive, and very distinctly not Prussian, she kept a diary every day from her tenth year to her death at 71 in 1914, and it is a wonderful diary, full of human interest and shrewd insights. Her husband, the Württemberg ambassador to Berlin, Carl Freiherr Hugo von Spitzemberg, whom she married on 18 September 1864, took a house on the Wilhelmstrasse next to the Bismarcks. Since Hildegard was beautiful, young, and clever, Bismarck found her a very agreeable conversation partner, and, since she recorded everything she saw and heard, she constitutes one of my most important sources. When in November 1887, the Bismarcks, both Prince and Princess, went to a court function, Hildegard Spitzemberg wrote in her diary: ‘16 November, B’s go to court—a great event. I would like to see the old rag that the dear lady pulls from her clothes closet and happy as can be puts on.’¹³⁸

Baroness Spitzemberg found herself regularly at the Bismarcks, and was often taken in to sit at the host’s right. He paid such attention to her that in March 1870 she confided to her diary:

Count Bismarck is at present more than ever unusually charming to me and seeks me out at every opportunity, is there some object behind it or is it purely personal?¹³⁹

The answer was probably both: there was ‘some object behind it’ and it was ‘purely personal’. Bismarck re-enacted with his ‘Hilgachen’ the same forbidden and impossible game of love he had carried on with Marie. The beautiful, clever woman—like his mother—could never be achieved and hence in order to survive and put an end to his loneliness he had chosen a plain and limited one. The pattern would repeat itself in the mid-1860s with Katarina Princess Orlov, again with a frankness in his feeling that must have been hard for Johanna to bear. In 1888 Bismarck spoke to Hildegard unusually frankly about his relationship to his wife and daughter:

When I observed that the Empress had never had a master over her who would have educated her, the Prince replied ‘broken but educated is harder than one thinks. With a wife you can do it sometimes but with a daughter that is a great work of art. I have clashed with Marie very hard. She has for all her intelligence a remarkably narrow circle of interests: husband, children, they fulfil her but otherwise almost nobody, let alone humanity, interests her. She is essentially lazy, that’s the problem.’ I replied, I wondered that she shared so few of his interests given that she so clearly loves him. ‘That’s the same with my wife. It had its good sides. I live in another atmosphere at home.’ On that subject a lot might have been said about real spiritual partnership between married people or between parents and children, but the way it is, what he said laughing in reply to Lehndorff’s toast contains the pure truth, ‘Yes, she is the best wife that I have had.’¹⁴⁰

The shrewd Baroness saw with the intuition that made her a great diarist the void at the core of Bismarck’s relationship to his wife. There was, as she wrote, the possibility of ‘real spiritual partnership between married people or between parents and children’ but Bismarck never experienced that. He undoubtedly loved Johanna. His letters show that. But she was, as he admitted to Baroness Spitzemberg, no intellectual, political, nor artistic companion, other than in her music. Nor was she ever prepared to play the role of ‘society lady’ which Hildegard Freifrau Hugo von Spitzemberg, daughter of a grand seigneur and prime minister of a kingdom, wife of another grand seigneur, played ‘as to the manor born’. In June 1885, Baroness Spitzemberg cleared her desk: ‘As I looked over the invitation cards of the past winter today for the last time before I tore them up, I calculated that from November to the present I had received 41 invitations to dinner and 53 to an evening.’¹⁴¹ The arithmetic shows that there were 94 formal invitations for the 197 days or one every other day for six and a half months, and that excludes less formal occasions without written invitations. A lady in the highest society lived that way. Johanna never did. The Bismarcks after a certain point simply stopped going out. As Holstein saw thirty years earlier, Johanna refused to play the game or to conform. Was that her way to repay Bismarck for marrying her on the rebound?

When Johanna finally died on 27 November 1894, Hildegard Spitzemberg discovered that she was no longer welcome ‘at Bismarcks’ as she had been for thirty years. It suddenly became clear that Johanna had wanted her there to play the role that she had filled: to give Bismarck that safe dose of feminine beauty and intelligence that Bismarck needed and Johanna could never supply. On 1 April 1895, Bismarck’s 80th birthday, when she was for the first time not invited to the party, Baroness Spitzemberg finally accepted that she had lost her entrée to the Bismarcks with the death of Johanna:

Since the death of the Princess, I lack the personality through whom I can make my wishes and rights count. Marie is entirely alienated, the sons, even when the Bismarcks were still here, stood apart from me. If I were a man, I could settle somewhere in Friedrichsruh and enjoy everything that happens from A to Z.¹⁴²

The loss of proximity to the great man meant a lot to her on a personal and intellectual level for he had given her that contact with the centre of power that filled the years with interest and the diary pages with content. There was also a social consideration. Bismarck represented the apex of power in Imperial Germany and his favour had raised the prestige of the Spitzembergs in a society still organized entirely by aristocratic rankings. When Johanna died, the contact ceased. The old Bismarck never asked for her, and she never saw him again.

In the spring of 1847, the electors of Magdeburg chose a 32-year-old country squire with a reputation for wild behaviour and irresponsible views. Yet he had something which nobody of his social set and generation could offer—an astonishingly powerful personality and a magnetism which must have attracted them. This self and the gigantic frame in which it rested was his only claim on them. He had no experience, no credentials, and no obvious qualifications, but he was Bismarck. That turned out to be enough.